Review: Kash Patel’s Government Gangsters
For years, Kash Pramod Patel has fantasized about remaking the F.B.I. “in his own image.” At least that’s what The New York Times’s Adam Goldman reported this weekend in his article, “Unease at F.B.I. Intensifies as Patel Ousts Top Officials.” Citing Patel’s 2023 book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, The Truth, and The Battle for Our Democracy, Goldman recounts the new F.B.I. director’s attempt to dismiss political partisans and find the sources of leaks with polygraphs.
More than any other Trumpworld personality, Patel has, through a mix of achievement and fortuity, remained at the forefront of every manufactured scandal that plagued the 45th president's tenure. After joining the Justice Department to work in counterterrorism during the Obama Administration, Patel took a job as a senior aide to Devin Nunes, then chief of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
With Nunes’s blessing, Patel was a central figure in debunking Russiagate, finding irrefutable evidence that the DNC and Clinton campaign paid for the infamous Steele Dossier. He then moved to the National Security Council and, in the administration's final days, the Department of Defense as chief of staff. In these positions, he witnessed the intelligence community’s entrenched bureaucrats waging further war on Trump through a variety of machinations from the “perfect phone call” with Ukraine to the Jan. 6 insurrection allegations.
Like Pete Hegseth’s The War on Warriors, Government Gangsters serves as an impressive audition for a political nomination that lays out its author’s reform-minded agenda. However, Patel is not the nihilist that Goldman and his legacy media colleagues have been claiming since his nomination. As Patel writes, “The Deep State isn’t synonymous with agencies and departments like the CIA, or NSC, or DoD. Instead, Deep State actors have infiltrated those agencies and abuse their power for their own benefit. But when those agencies operate within their lawful authority and as intended, well, that’s how you take out terrorists like [ISIS leader] Baghdadi.”
Throughout the book, Patel is far more concerned with advocating for reform than offering up a salacious cash grab in the vein of recent tell-alls by the likes of John Bolton and Mark Esper– political hacks for whom the new sheriff in town reserves top-shelf contempt. Such explains why the Biden administration redacted several passages of the book and tried to slow-walk its release. Given Patel’s incendiary and outlandish statements like, “Our task then is to focus on the abuses and to make specific changes that will push the intelligence community back toward its original purpose: providing clear and accurate information to our leaders so that they can make the best decisions possible for the people,” it makes total sense.
While Government Gangsters is a gripping read that proves DC’s most flamboyant man about town is as unassuming as he is knowledgeable, the most beneficial part of his book is the lengthy appendix that includes the full text of the Nunes Report and the U.S. Capitol Police’s official timeline of January 6. If such transparency and context are pillars of the Patel image, we are in for change indeed.
Government Gangsters is available wherever books are sold.